Well said, but if you ask me, the Habs wont be contenders until they land a big name centre/forward. And to me they missed out on it when they were a relatively bad team circa 2000-2005. They shouldve "tanked" and got their: Heatley, Kovalchuk, Nash, Staal, Ovechkin, Crosby, Toews/J.Staal, Stamkos, Tavares, Hall.....

Look at the pattern.... Pittsburgh, Washington, Chicago, and soon to be Edmonton. It is THE safest way to build your Cup winning team. Dont count on the Habs to make to the semis again with the team they have.

Thats what Ive been saying for a while now. But that just MY OPINION

Sure, tanking is the easiest way to build a Cup winning team. System is a bit broken there imo (you just shouldn't let the same team draft top 3-5 players back to back year, to me it encourages mediocrity WAY too much, when you have a star player you should have to improve).

But realistically Habs won't be tanking for a while, the team is actually too good for that (despite what some people seem to think...). Do I want to tank in 3 years, wait for a star to be drafted in 5 and have a contender in 8? That's a pretty damn pathetic plan to me.

Habs actually have a fairly solid line-up when healthy with many young players pushing at key positions. They're NOT that far from being a contender. And I think Eller actually has the potential to be a solid big center, just give him 1-2 years. MaxPac will likely be one too.

Our strength is undoubtedly in goals and on defense right now, and I think that a team SHOULD build on its strengths much more than trying to even things out everywhere. Build the best defense + goalie in the league (not saying we're there or we'll get there, but aim for it) and weaknesses in front will be much less problematic. You can always score on the PP, ESPECIALLY with Markov, Subban and Wiz in the line-up... And guys like Plekanec, Cammalleri, AK, MaxPac, Gionta will still know how to score goals, even if they don't put as many as they'd like.

I believe personally that top defenses/goalies can win championships even with an average offense. I don't think it works the other way around (see : Flyers, Capitals. But Capitals seem to have understand and are much better defensively this year, and Flyers are much more of a threat since they got Pronger, but we saw last year in the finals how much it cost them to have a weak goalie).

If you dominate at one aspect of the game (be it offense or defense really), you force the other team to play your game. If you're just average everywhere, you're forced to play their game at a disadvantage because you can't really exploit the advantages you have over them.